Are you a Jew?” were Claude Lanzmann`s only words of greeting.
Lanzmann, in Chicago to promote the Jewish Community Centers` showing of
”Shoah,” his widely acclaimed cinematic reconstruction of the Holocaust, had just been introduced to a reporter with whom he would be having lunch.
”Well, I . . . yes, I am,” the reporter managed to stammer, more than a little off balance for having to face an interrogator who–except for his movie–was still a total stranger. Soon, his composure restored by anger, the reporter returned the question.
”Of course not!” Lanzmann snapped, as if he had long since practiced his sardonic answer. ”I hate the Jews. Why else would I make such a movie?” The incident was an early storm warning, an alert to Lanzmann`s conviction that an artist`s privilege is a valid excuse for some very deficient social graces. A day with him can be nearly as wrenching an experience as his film is.
For 9 1/2 hours, ”Shoah” forces its viewers to confront the World War II destruction of Eastern Europe`s Jewry. Directors before him have worked over that same material. So, too, have any number of literary artists. Lanzmann`s genius was to simplify the subject by stripping it down to the inescapable, human essentials.
”Historians only know facts,” he observed during a brief truce. ”For me, that`s not enough. Not nearly enough.”
Lanzmann`s cinematic method depends on putting surviving witnesses through a series of exhaustive interviews in which each recalls the part of the crime that he experienced. One by one, former extermination camp inmates, their Nazi guards, Polish railroad workers who steered the death trains and the German bureaucrats who supervised their efforts pause full-frame before Lanzmann`s camera.
So do the peasants living alongside the sites of the death camps, people who, 40 years later, don`t even attempt to disguise their anti-Semitism. In Lanzmann`s eyes, that prejudice made them accomplices to the murder of millions of their fellow citizens. Poland is better off without the Jews, one such group explains to Lanzmann.
How come? he asks them.
”Because they stank. The Jews smelled bad,” comes the peasants` reply.
For any of his subjects who hesitate, or try to beg off a question, Lanzmann`s on-screen response is as curtly demanding as were his initial words. ”You must! You know that, don`t you?” he says to a former inmate barber who balks before the task of recounting how a fellow concentration camp worker had to cut his own wife`s and children`s hair off just before they went into the gas chamber.
Even those interviewees whose answers come quickly are subject to a bombardment of ever more demanding questions. Not content with the verbs and nouns by which his informants reconstruct the horror of the camps, Lanzmann insists that they also supply the kind of precise adjectives that usually drop out of 40-years-after-the-fact recollections.
”In winter time, how cold would it be on the receiving ramp at Auschwitz where new inmates were forced to strip naked?” he insists on knowing.
”How wide was the corridor through which prisoners had to pass on their way to the ovens?” he demands. ”Ten meters? Fifteen? More?”
Behind a motion picture camera, Lanzmann is a man obsessed with details. For the 11 years that went into the making of ”Shoah,” he gathered the most minute specifications, as if possessed by a demonic need not to let a single page of the Holocaust`s blueprints pass into the oblivion of historical forgetfulness.
He has, however, no such meticulous doggedness for dragging forth the details of his own life. For almost every question, he has a ready evasion or offers a carefully crafted professional biography. He doesn`t wait long before informing a new acquaintance that he edits a journal founded by Jean Paul Sartre, the late arbiter elegentarium of France`s literary Pantheon.
”I was discussing just that question with Simone the other day,” is Lanzmann`s way of establishing his membership in the inner sanctum of Parisian intellectuals presided over by Sartre`s long-time companion and philosophical heir. The slight arch that comes over one eyebrow as he excises Madame de Beauvoir`s last name signals that Lanzmann`s celebrity-dropping shorthand is designed to be a Rorschach Test of an interviewer`s literacy.
In trying to probe his cultural credentials, one quickly discovers that Lanzmann is no willing accomplice. He yields each of his own vital statistics only after hours-long battles. By mid-afternoon, those in his party knew exactly what Lanzmann meant when he recalled how, during his project`s middle years, he felt that death would likely overtake him long before final editing. Like the exquisitely slow shots of cattle cars rolling down the tracks to Auschwitz and Treblinka that punctuate his film, Lanzmann`s answers come at a tempo of his own choosing. The reporter`s notebook records the following timetable:
By early afternoon, he conceded his own biological Jewishness. Several hours after that, he grudgingly explained that his father had had his own final solution to at least one household`s share of the Jewish question.
In the years before World War II, the senior Lanzmann had progressively shed all signs of his ancestral heritage. Young Claude was raised without any religious training, and when his younger brother came along, their father left his last-born son uncircumcised. Finally, the father abandoned Lanzmann`s mother in favor of a gentile woman.
”My mother was very cultured,” Lanzmann said by way of explaining why she failed his father`s racial-purity test. ”She was an expert on Chinese and Greek antiquities and things like that. But she had been taken to France from Russia as a child, and never mastered the shift in languages. She`d wind up stammering over her words. She also had this big, bulbous nose. So for her, there was no way to disguise what she was.”
When the German army marched into Paris, the senior Lanzmann`s melting-pot experiment came to an abrupt end. By the Nazis` definition, Jewishness was not a matter of individual choice but a collective death sentence. The whole family had to go into hiding. By that point, Lanzmann had been left psychologically stranded.
”I am a broken Jew,” he said. ”Only such a pathetic creature could devote 11 years of his life to making this kind of movie.”
Each revelation of a facet of his past was separated by public demonstrations of a kind of outlandish boorishness that would have been remarkable even in the golden age of Hollywood and the Sam Goldwyn dreadful-excess-style of movie moguls.
”Shoah” is not entertainment in the ordinary sense. Yet it is shown on a movie screen in a theater. There is an intermission and a candy counter in the lobby. The fact that members of the audience return from a trip to the refreshement stand to be confronted by images of places where other human beings were starved half to death before being consigned to the gas chambers must give every viewer a moral problem to wrestle with. Everyone, that is, except the director.
”Why do you just stand there and let them go in and out?” Lanzmann screamed at a teenaged usherette as a few late comers scurried back to their seats after the matinee performance`s intermission. ”What do you think this is, a Chinese Opera?”
Later that evening, Lanzmann wrapped himself in his Great Artist role for an appearance at Northwestern University. Upwards of 150 students were gathered in a lecture hall, and fully two-thirds must have raised their hands when the moderator asked how many had seen ”Shoah.” In an age when it is not easy to get students to do their required course reading, that sea of extra-curricular out-stretched arms was an impressive tribute to the guest of honor.
In response, Lanzmann announced that he was too tired to make any formal remarks but would answer questions instead. Then he put the microphone so close to his mouth that his words virtually drowned in an undercurrent of feedback, as if more than a decade of film-making had failed to make him aware of his craft`s electronic basics.
One of the first questions came from a young man overflowing with outrage at what he had seen in ”Shoah” and desperate to try to comprehend how a previous generation had allowed such crimes to occur. His face burned with the insistent desire to understand, a fire that great teachers have always responded to since Socrates first saw it in a youthful Plato`s eyes. The young man wanted to know why, and prefaced that big question by putting it in the context of a certain scene from Lanzmann`s film.
”In that episode where the Nazi officer is describing Treblinka, how could he . . . ” the student started to ask.
”That was at Auschwitz,” Lanzmann interrupted, the distorted booming of his voice startling his youthful questioner.
”Oh! Okay,” the young man tried to continue. ”But how could he . . . ”
”You didn`t listen to me,” Lanzmann cut in a second time. ”That scene was describing Auschwitz not Treblinka. Do you understand now?”
In the end, the young man never did get to ask his question. For Lanzmann, it seemed more important to downgrade the student for being slightly confused about one detail out of all of those contained in a 9 1/2-hour film.
